Ministry rolls out anti-spam plans

The Ministry of Information and Communication announced yesterday it will adopt new measures in December to reduce the circulation of spam e-mail. The ministry’s plan is designed to prevent the delivery of spam messages with fake sender information. Under the ministry’s Sender Policy Framework, participating portal sites will share e-mail server information. When a mail server receives an e-mail, it will monitor the Internet address that appears in the message and compare it with the Internet address on which the mail was originally composed. If the system finds the two Internet addresses do not match, the message will automatically be blocked from reaching its destination. The ministry said the majority of spammers used fake Internet addresses to hide their identities, and added 90 percent of all spam messages that show a domestic portal site as a sender are ones that have forged their sender information by altering Internet addresses. The ministry said the new system could help reduce such messages by up to 20 percent. The nation’s leading portal sites, such as Naver, Daum, Nate, MSN, Dreamwiz and Empas, have agreed to cooperate with the ministry in cracking down on spam. With the assistance of the Korea Information Security Agency, these sites will work toward completing a database for sharing mail server information by the end of November. The ministry also plans to bring other, smaller e-mail service providers into the new framework. by Yoo Jee-ho